The Audi followed.
Bridge gripped the wheel to stop her hands trembling, and swore under her breath. She’d been OIT again for a little under forty-eight hours and already she was potentially blown, gaining a tail before she’d begun the assignment proper. She tried to lose it; a turn here, a turn there, another, and another. Her driving wasn’t completely random, because she didn’t want to risk being pulled over by any police. But after a short while she’d lost her bearings, and wasn’t entirely sure where she was going. The built-in GPS kept squawking at her to turn around, take this turn or that road, but she muted the volume and ignored it.
And then she nearly rear-ended the car in front, as it suddenly halted for a flock of sheep.
“Mange ton cul, connard! Dégage avec tes putains de moutons!” she shouted out of the window, but the farmer studiously ignored her and continued to move his livestock slowly across the road. Bridge felt pinpricks of sweat building on her skin, despite the air conditioning. She glanced in the rear-view mirror. The Audi was still there. Where else? Like her, it was stuck in this traffic queue. For a crazy moment she considered abandoning the car, just getting out and walking to the next village, to call Henri and ask him to put her on the next flight home. Or she could take the car south, to Côte-d’Or, to throw herself on her sister’s mercy and go AWOL for the summer. She wasn’t cut out for this. No matter what Dr Nayar said, or Giles thought, she wasn’t ready.
And yet. Ten’s death, and her dinner with Izzy last week, had made Bridge realise how few friends she really had. If she gave up now, Ten’s killer might never be punished, perhaps never found. And that would hurt her more than Doorkicker ever could.
The sheep were thinning out at last. She sounded her horn, but the car in front didn’t budge. She checked her rear-view mirror and saw the other drivers inching forward, preparing to move. The Audi was pulling out a little, as if to overtake the other cars, and — draw level with her, maybe? There were two sheep still yet to cross, but they were lagging behind the main flock by quite a way. Enough to fit a small car, like a Fiat.
Bridge floored the accelerator and pulled away, out from behind the first car in the queue, one wheel churning up the grass verge, and sped through the gap between the sheep. The farmer shouted and swore at her, his arms flailing with angry disbelief. One straggler sheep panicked, and ran into the road. She spun the wheel to avoid it, bringing the Fiat back onto the tarmac, narrowly missing the rear end of another sheep halfway across. She yanked the steering wheel back into the turn to maintain control. The wheels skidded under her for a second, leaving their mark on the road. Then they made purchase and she was away as fast as she dared, speeding through a junction, back toward the highway.
In her mirror she saw the other cars following, now the sheep were out of the way. The car that had been in front of her was stalled, and the others driving round it. The blue Audi turned off at the next junction, heading deeper into the countryside.
It hadn’t been following her.
She pulled over to the side of the road and, when she was finally able to prise her fingers from the steering wheel, turned off the engine. Her rapid, ragged breath was like a roar in the quiet of the countryside.
27
The windscreen exploded, showering her with fragments of glass.
The jeep had no rear-view mirror. Bridge wiped sweat from her eyes with her sleeve, glanced over her shoulder, and saw another vehicle following her across the desert. One man driving, two shooting.
The jeep had been under a camouflaged gazebo, guarded by a single armed sentry. His companions were presumably away finding out what the hell was making the ground shake, but the sentry himself wasn’t on high alert. Bridge almost felt bad for shooting him in the back of the head while he blew smoke rings from an acrid Russian cigarette.
Almost.
It started first time and she stood on the accelerator, kicking up a dust cloud twice the vehicle’s size as it sped away. At the last minute, figuring it couldn’t make things any worse, she yanked the wheel hard right and smashed head first into the comsat dish — the site’s only uplink, according to the mission data. The mission plan said to leave it operational, to spread the infection if the server was ever put online, but with the server room now a pile of rubble it seemed almost churlish not to destroy it, too.
She tried not to think about Adrian, lying underneath all that rubble, and to focus instead on the route ahead of her. That was proving difficult. Sure, he’d screwed up, but so had Bridge. If she’d been more assertive, had been able to persuade him that she knew what she was doing…but then she didn’t, did she? Her first OIT, and when the bullets began to fly she’d frozen up. Now the Russians knew this location, a repurposed bolthole from the Iraq war, was compromised. Screw their legends, it didn’t matter now if Moscow thought she and Adrian were Serbian, British, or even Chinese. The whole op was a bust, and instead of infecting the target server, she’d had no choice but to blow it up.
She’d escaped, and driven like a madwoman through the desert night, because there was no sense in both operatives
